Another Podcast

The end of the network effect

28 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

OpenAI has some big questions. It doesn’t have unique tech. It has a big user base, but with limited engagement and stickiness and no network effect...

AI and SaaS

23 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

What does AI do to software? What's a more interesting answer than 'no, this won't kill SaaS'? And what comes after the euphoria?

How does OpenAI compete?

20 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

OpenAI has all the mindshare and 800m weekly active users, but the models remain commodities and platforms with their own distribution are coming up f...

The AI presentation

16 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It's time for Benedict's annual Tech Trends presentation. What's new, what's boring, what are the new questions?

A double episode: AI differentiation, and Apple does F1

21 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How can billion dollar chatbots differentiate when they're all doing the same thing in the same way?- and -Why is tech into F1, and why is F1 into tec...

Looking for AI strategies

05 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It's easy to say what tech companies want from AI, but much harder to talk about the product strategy - they're all pretty much the same. "Just build ...

Ai eats the world

08 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

For the past decade, Benedict has given an annual presentation on the state of technology, and he did the latest at Slush in Helsinki last month. In t...

From SAAS software to Formula 1

11 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Benedict went from being a consultant to an analyst to having his own business, but in essence, he's always been an analyst. Toni went from policy to ...

Google's Antitrust case

19 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

A quarter century after 'don't be evil', a judge has found that Google is abusing its monopoly in search. But no-one knows what happens next, and whet...

The AI summer

01 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As we go into the summer, we know a lot more about generative AI than we did six or nine months ago - or at least, we have better questions.

Looking for AI use-cases

01 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Generative AI is the thing, and all new software will be built around it. But while everyone is experimenting and some people are getting huge value o...

Tiktok, Apple and Temu

13 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Will the US finally break up Tiktok? Will the EU break up the App Store? And why does Temu want to keep your orders under $800?

Google Gemini and AI bias

03 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Are there questions that an AI chatbot shouldn't answer? Should it always give the 'right answer'? Are you sure? Google has egg on its face this week,...

Breaking and remaking media

16 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We’re past peak TV, the charts are curving down, and Hollywood is pretty sure that streaming was a bad idea. On the other hand, music is growing str...

Apple's Vision Pro

08 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Yes, we bought one. What’s it like and what can we say that we didn’t say last summer? What has Apple built, what is it for, what does it mean for...

What's your AI strategy?

29 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Everyone needs an AI strategy (there was an email from the CEO!) but what would that mean? How does a big company work out how to deploy a new technol...

AI and Everything Else

17 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Every year, Benedict produces a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. Here are some of the key takeaways from th...

LLMs, links, and the death of links

29 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

We spent the last 30 years building structures on top or instead of the raw links of the web, from Google to TikTok… but now LLMs might read all the...

Bundling/Unbundling AI

22 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

ChatGPT and LLMs can do anything (or look like they can), so what can you do with them? How do you know? Do we move to chat bots as a magical general-...

The magic customer

15 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

A conversation with Leonard Brody, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Caravan. How do you build brands and consumer products in a world of infinite ...

Unbundling ChatGPT

17 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Nine months on, everyone is still trying to understand where ChatGPT will go, but one big question for us: how is this useful, for us, today? What's t...

Threads

21 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

What is Threads? A Twitter that doesn't suck? Something else? Could it work?

Vision Pro, two weeks on

18 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Two weeks after Apple showed us the Vision Pro - what have they built, what is it for, what does it mean for Meta, and why does it cost $3,500? Check ...

Apple Vision

05 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Apple does VR. We watched. We took pictures. We talk about it.

Working out AI questions

01 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

We don't know what generative AI will be (or what will happen next week), but we're starting to work out what questions to ask

Buzzfeed News, Reddit and OpenAI

24 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Buzzfeed News dies just as Reddit and Stack Overflow say they'll charge LLMs to train on their data. Who owns content and how does distribution work i...

Metaverse and crypto - beyond the BS

16 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Crypto crashed, metaverse was silly, and now we know that generative AI is the future of everything. Right? Well, sort of. But though the hype has mov...

AI, copyright and collective knowledge

02 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

If you spend an hour typing prompts into MidJourney, who owns the result? There are easy answers to this, but they're probably wrong - these are new q...

GPT-4 is here, now what?

27 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Generative machine learning is moving so fast it's impossible to keep up. What questions can we ask about GPT4, before everything changes again next w...

The right questions to ask about TikTok

20 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The 'ban it' snowball is getting bigger and bigger, but what problem are we solving - privacy, or propaganda? How does this scale to all the other Chi...

Amazon's $40B advertising business

12 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Amazon sold close to $40bn of advertising last year - bigger than Prime, bigger than the entire global newspaper industry and probably more profitable...

ChatGPT versus Google

12 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Microsoft thinks (or says) that Generative ML will reset the search market, unlocking Google's market share and collapsing those 60% operating margins...

Generative search

06 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

What would generative search mean? Generative video? Indeed, Generative products? Last week we talked about how ChatGPT, LLMs and generative ML work -...

Generative AI

30 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The wave of enthusiasm around ChatGPT and generative AI feels like another Imagenet moment - a step change in what ‘AI’ can do that could generali...

Why are chips interesting again?

19 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Chips have always been the foundation of tech, but the rest of us didn't need to pay much attention - stuff just got faster every year. But now there ...

No Soup for You! Regulating tech M&A

11 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Within and Activision, but also PA Semi and Android - how do we think about big tech buying stuff, and why is it hard for regulators?

ChatGPT and the Imagenet Moment

05 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

When machine learning started really working, back in 2012-13-14, the demos were amazing, but it wasn't immediately obvious how universal the applicat...

All the other things happening in tech part 1.

29 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

What does Anker have to do with Mr Beast, Amazon ads or Aesop? A chat about unbundling ecommerce and building brands in a world of infinite media.

The FTX face-palm

18 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

What can we say about a ‘crypto’ crash if we’re not crypto people, nor Wall Street people? How much does it matter?

How many metaverses?

31 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Every now and then, big company CEOs all read the same tech trends piece and send the same email - "what's our strategy for this?!" And in 2022, there...

Wondering about generative AI

19 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Generative AI looks like second wave of ML hat might be as big a deal as the Imagenet wave from 2013 or so. What questions can we ask?

Figma, unbundling and $20bn of antitrust

19 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

What does Adobe's purchase of Figma tell us about the ways that software is changing, and the kinds of tools that people build and use? And, how long ...

TV after software

05 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

‘Software eats the world’, and now it’s eating TV, but then what? Pretty soon software seems to stop mattering, and all the questions become TV ...

A new wave of company creation

23 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Adam Neumann's latest venture shines a light on some of the interesting questions that arise, such as: What is this, what could it be, and can it work...

Lighting and tech diffusion

15 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

What does a light on a restaurant table say about the failure of smart home startups? Or Shein?Follow Benedict on TwitterFollow Toni on Twitter

The FTC's antitrust thesis

01 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The US is fundamentally rethinking its approach to competition, and M&A, and tech, and big tech buying startups. The FTC trying to block Meta from b...

When the point of leverage changes

25 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

What does 'focus' mean for a trillion dollar company? Amazon is buying doctors and Apple might be a bank - should we change our assumptions for what t...

Remember AI?

18 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Five years ago AI was everything, but attention moved on (Metaverse! Crypto!) and ‘Applied AI’ became useful but boring. Now things like DALL-E lo...

What's next for advertising?

06 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Advertising is $700bn - after IDFA and the cookie apocalypse, what else is breaking apart and where do things land?Follow Benedict on TwitterFollow To...

Three ways to say no

30 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The more that governments, regulators, policy-makers and activists demand that tech works differently, the more argument there is, and the more that t...

Shein, TikTok and Netflix - thinking about limits

26 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Shein added 60k new products in the last week - double Zara and H&M's total combined stock. Netflix made more shows last year than the entire US TV in...

Metaverse - how to be wrong in the right way

16 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

What do we mean when we say 'the metaverse'? And what do we mean by interoperability?It's far more useful to get specific about how we think about the...

Stories in the noise

02 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Elon made a lot of noise this week, but what else was going on? We chat about half a dozen things that happened in tech this week, all of them more in...

Netflix isn't a tech company

25 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Netflix missed its numbers, but what's really going on in streaming? Is this a tech company, and does it have winner-takes-all effects? Or are all the...

The future of Twitter

18 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Elon is on manoeuvres, but what are the problems? Has he thought about this at all? Why has Twitter always been such a mess, and why is it such a tiny...

Are you a seal?

11 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

‘Big tech’ is big and scary, but do they care about your market? They could come in, yes, and make a mess, but would that make any sense for them?...

The Evolution of networks

14 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Web3 will remake networks, content and online publishing - apparently. But how many cycles have we been through, how much do the forms, networks and i...

Ukraine

07 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

A chat about Ukraine without pretending we know about Russia, geopolitics and Ukraine. Rather we will focus on some of the things happening in and aro...

Talking about crypto

01 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Crypto is so big and yet so unclear that we can’t even agree what to call it. What does ‘web3’ mean, what might it mean, how do we ignore the no...

The retail reset

21 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Everything comes out of Covid (we hope), especially retail. US ecommerce penetration jumped forward a little and the UK a lot, but what kinds of compa...

Asking the dumb questions

18 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

One thing is obvious in tech, there are so many questions worth exploring. In 2022, we are thinking about cars and infrastructure, crypto and web3, ...

What we know about web 3 so far

15 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Another episode on our theme ‘how to talk about X if you’re not in the field’ - this time ‘Web3’, the new brand name for crypto. How do we i...

How to think about tech

08 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

We can talk all day about crypto, or VR or Facebook, but how might we talk about *everything* in tech? What are the frameworks and tools to structure ...

The Meta reality

02 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

There are two strands to this story: the second phase of Facebook which is the Metaverse (which we previously spoke about on the podcast) and Facebook...

Metaverse - beyond the buzzword

18 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

‘Metaverse’ is the buzzword of the moment, yet it doesn’t really exist as more than a label on a whiteboard, and many of the ideas it tries to c...

Regulation - Who will notice?

28 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Tech regulation and the problems that prompt it to fill every headline. But is structural change coming? Who will this affect? Who will notice?Follow ...

Apple's metronome

20 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The new iPhones are boring, and why that's interesting. Plus, Apple and Epic stumble towards a new App Store model, and - Real Soon Now - Apple! glass...

Games and Roblox

26 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The barrier to entry to gaming is lower than it has ever been. But are there more gamers today? Are more 10-year-olds playing games today than they di...

Telcos and Tesla

15 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Why hasn't tech disrupted mobile network operators? Smartphones changed everything about mobile, and yet the networks are all still there with pretty ...

Creativity and Optimism

13 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

A conversation about creativity, working with tech and optimism with Nicolas Roope, agency and startup co-founder who has ridden many of the revolutio...

'Digital transformation' - beyond the silly slogan

05 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

'Digital transformation' sounds like a terrible marketing slogan, but it describes a pretty basic generational change in how big companies do tech. Wh...

Tech in china, from inside and outside

29 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

This is a follow-up to our conversation on Chinese tech with someone who knows a lot more about this space than we do - Lillian Li, who writes the wee...

The Business of publishing

21 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

This is a follow-up to our conversation on Ad Tech with someone who knows a little more about this space than we do - Jeremy White, Executive Editor W...

Paying attention to Apple again

14 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Why do we watch WWDC? Did Apple do anything that matters if you don't own an iPhone? And what's the war on privacy?Follow Benedict on TwitterFollow To...

Trying to understand Ad Tech

14 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Online advertising is worth $300bn, and yet almost no-one that doesn't work on an ad team really understands much of it. So what is the cookie apocaly...

App stores: arguing like it's 2009

07 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Benedict and Toni discuss the ongoing debates surrounding app stores, but specifically Apple's app store.Follow Benedict on TwitterFollow Toni on Tw...

Who's in the office? Notes on a year of remote work.

28 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Benedict and Toni discuss remote work, collaboration and conferences in 2022.Follow Benedict on TwitterFollow Toni on Twitter

Shopify and digital transformation

21 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Benedict and Toni discuss changing habits, digital transformation and Shopify.Follow Benedict on TwitterFollow Toni on Twitter

Clubhouse and the endless cycle of social apps

14 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Benedict and Toni discuss the new forms of social, and specifically Clubhouse, the latest social audio app.Follow Benedict on TwitterFollow Toni on Tw...

Bezos and the Amazon machine

07 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Benedict and Toni discuss Amazon and solving problems.Follow Benedict on TwitterFollow Toni on Twitter

Telling stories with charts

31 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Benedict and Toni discuss the best ways to tell compelling stories with charts.The presentation we discussed Follow Benedict on TwitterFollow Toni ...

Why do we care about games?

24 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Benedict and Toni discuss why games matter and their place within the tech industry.Follow Benedict on TwitterFollow Toni on Twitter

Two Europeans talk about China

17 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

How do we look at China if we're *not* China experts?Follow Benedict on TwitterFollow Toni on Twitter

There's no such thing as data

10 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Benedict and Toni talk about data, buzzwords and TED talks.Follow Benedict on TwitterFollow Toni on Twitter

The history of doom-scrolling

03 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Benedict and Toni talk about newsletters and more specifically, Substack.Follow Benedict on TwitterFollow Toni on Twitter

What comes next?

22 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Benedict and Toni talk about what comes after the smartphone, and whether even matter. Maybe the models of how to think about this question have more ...

The FTC and Facebook

13 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Benedict and Toni talk about the latest big antitrust push - the US (both states and FTC) versus Facebook. Will it work? And how to contrast it with t...

Slack, Salesforce and the future of work

07 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Benedict and Toni talk about the latest Slack acquisition by Salesforce and what this means for the whole 'future of work' thing.Follow Benedict on Tw...

F1 - the plane that never takes off

29 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Benedict and Toni talk about Formula 1 and 50s experimental aircraft, and how they overlap in interesting ways with technology, innovation, and creati...

The acceleration of ecommerce habits

23 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Benedict and Toni discuss how ecommerce shot up in lockdown and what habits may be sticking.Ecommerce charts: LinkFollow Benedict on TwitterFollow Ton...